Picking at a tear in her jeans with her nail, Jose mulled it over, eventually coming to a decision and saving me from having to find the other words I figured would be needed to convince her. “Ok, so what do my dare issues have to do with whatever’s going on here?”
Blowing a raspberry on Liv’s hand and grinning when she pulled it back and started giggling, I looked up at Jose and laid it out. “I dare you to go on a date with me.” I’d only just gotten the words out when princess grabbed my lip again so that I’d repeat what I’d just done.
Because I was looking down at the baby, I missed Jose’s reaction. In fact, it wasn’t until she spoke that I realized exactly how bad her dare issues were.
“You’re a dead woman,” she snapped at Tabby, getting up and storming into the kitchen, and slamming pots and pans around.
Looking over and grinning at my best friend, who was watching all of this with a small smile on his face, I grinned even wider when I looked down at Tabby and saw her expression. Rather than being upset she looked relieved, which was proven by the dramatic arm sweep over her forehead when I caught her eye. She’d been subtly grilling me and finding out everything she could about me since we’d met, and today when she’d let this tidbit slip, she’d added that she only wanted for her sister to know what it truly meant to be loved and have people taking her back. This had been followed by a warning that if I did anything to hurt her, she’d shove my balls into my eyeballs, my eyeballs up my asshole, and my penis down my throat. I had zero intentions of ever doing anything to hurt Jose or Liv, far from it, but that sounded too nasty to test if she was serious or not.
“So, where are you taking her?” Tabby asked loudly, snorting when Jose yelled ‘bitch’, moving on to slamming drawers now instead of the pots and pans.
Shit! Where was I going to take her? I honestly hadn’t thought this would work, regardless of what Tabby had said, so I hadn’t planned this far ahead. Seeing the panic on my face, both DB and Tabby burst out laughing, the noise making Liv jump before she joined in.
Sticking her head around the corner to glare at us, Jose snapped, “Eat shit!” Before disappearing back into the kitchen. “I’ll pass,” Tabby called back to her, winking at me.
I knew that she trusted me, and I trusted myself to make this the best experience of Jose’s life. I also knew that I was going to do everything I could to make this more than one date and open her eyes to what ‘living her best life’ really meant. It meant achieving what she was setting out to do – live every day, smile every day, enjoy every day, and shake off the bad shit as quickly as she could. I was going to make that happen, and I was going to ensure that she knew she wasn’t alone, and that having people to do that with would make life a better and richer experience.
I wanted the best for the Harrison girls, and I was going to prove it.
But. Fucking. How?Chapter 3Jose
I’ll hold my hands up, having an issue with dares is actually a funny thing, and it’s one of those immature issues that can follow us through life. Really, I should have outgrown it by now, but the reasons I couldn’t weren’t ones that were easily shaken off.
When I was growing up, Mom had a couple of boyfriends and male friends who had tried inappropriate things. When I’d said no and threatened to report them to the police, they’d replied, “I dare you,” every single time. Wrong thing to say, because I had reported them. That was issue number one.
Issue number two : I had three best friends growing up – two males and a female. Jorgie, Carl, and Rebecca. We’d met when we were three, and even though we lived far enough away from each other at different sides of the country to not see each other that often, we were still in contact to this day. Thanks to the gods of modern technology though, we could still text and video call each other, so we did it regularly. Anyway, after being bullied during break time by a kid at our school, Jorgie had dared me to shove a worm down the kid’s t-shirt. I’d taken it literally and had done just that after the kid tried to pull my shorts down at recess. From that point onward, whenever one of us dared the other to do something, we did it, not once thinking that it was the wrong thing to do. The dares lasted for all of four months before we were called into the principal’s office after a big incident – at freaking pre-school – and he’d told us not to take things that we’d heard said so literally. This might all sound a bit bizarre until you got to the crux of the story. The reason we got busted was because we’d taken a planned class trip into the woods near us to find ladybugs and Carl had asked Jorgie a question. Repeating something he’d heard his dad say – incorrectly I’ll add – Jorgie had replied with, “Does a dare shit in the woods.” Our teacher had found him a couple of minutes later, happily squatting behind the tree next to where we were, not a care in the world as he pooped in the woods. It bears mentioning that this was only strike one for that day…